Intentionally Small Urban Living?

As a documentary version of a blog, Urban Living, Intentionally Small: Urban Living in North Carolina illustrates how an architect in Raleigh, NC, creates a sustainable lifestyle by choosing to downsize. To encourage both efficiency and green living, filmmaker and architect Nicole Alverez decides to rent a 300 square foot apartment above a dentist office rather than adopting the large house culture of most cities and suburbs around the U.S.

The documentary introduces Alvarez and her home, but it also provides a strong rationale for downsizing that takes the joys of everyday life into account. Alvarez's initial studio apartment was small but well-designed for her single lifestyle. Everything she needed was in reach in and outside the apartment. She could reach the sink and recycling bin from her kitchen table, for example. And she could walk to her architecture design firm. 

As Alvarez explains in her blog,

"It was the first time that I could walk to a coffee shop, a few bars, a yoga studio, even my job. I  felt connected to my community in a way I never had before. I quickly realized that what I loved most about living in a small space was the way of living that inevitably followed. Less space meant less physical and mental clutter, and therefore more time to enjoy life."

After viewing the documentary and reading Alvarez's blog, I'm not quite ready to move out of my 1100 square foot house, but I am ready to give away and recycle some of my unnecessary belongings. As Alvarez suggests, "Living comfortably in a small space is all about editing out what you don’t need – both in your physical environment and your general lifestyle." Even in the 1170 square foot city house she now shares with her husband and dog, Alvarez embraces this advice. I'm willing to begin this editing process today. 

Gudmundsson's Mountain Mourning and Stewardship

BJ Gudmundsson’s Mountain Mourning (2007) stands out because it explicitly states its Christian position but also because it too agues for sustainable development without attempting an evenhanded approach to MTR. The film was presented by Christians for the Mountains and bases its opposition to Mountaintop Removal Mining on biblical assertions like “The Earth is the Lord’s.” As in other MTR documentaries, Mountain Mourning highlights the richness of mountain resources and the cultures they have sustained for centuries, but here facts are delivered with sacred music in the background. “Blessed Jesus” accompanies information about the hardwood forests in Appalachia, along with pristine scenes of deer, ginseng, and black cohosh. A billboard declaring, “This is Coal Country” breaks the meditative tone of the film, and the narration reinforces the conflict. The billions of tons of coal used to produce over fifty percent of our electricity results in sulfur dioxide pollutants that are the main cause of acid rain. To more easily reach this coal commodity, according to the film, MTR replaced much of underground mining, the narrator reveals, explaining the destruction left behind when 600 feet of a mountaintop is removed to reach the exposed coal seams, so that dragline cranes can scoop out all the mineral like seeds out of a split melon.

Costs to the landscape range from loss of forests through clear-cutting, erosion, runoff, and black water spills, streams buried by valley fills, construction of slurry sludge ponds to store black water left from coal processing and slurry spills resulting from weakened dams. The film shows floods caused by slurry spills and erosion to illustrate dangerous repercussions of MTR. According to Gudmundsson, half of the mountains in Southern West Virginia will be gone in the next 20 years if permits are submitted and approved at the current rate.  

Other costs are economic but negatively affect human and nonhuman nature, as well. Generated in part by MTR erosion, devastating floods destroyed 5000 homes and businesses in 2001, and 4000 in 2002. MTR’s repercussions are pushing people out of the hollers and into FEMA trailers. Whole communities must be relocated away from MTR sites because of blasting, contaminated drinking water, and dust. An enormous number of jobs have been lost in the state in the last three decades, decreasing the number of miners from 120,000 to fewer than 15,000. Counties in West Virginia are now like Third World countries, the film declares, noting that McDowell County, West Virginia is now the eighth poorest in the United States. Over 3000 children live there in poverty, asserts the narrator. 

In spite of these dire conditions, however, the film begins and ends with hope as it supports sustainable development and maintains its anti-MTR stance. Musicians support a “Vigil for the Mountains” that opens and closes the film, an attempt to raise awareness of mountaintop removal mining and its consequences. Instead of experts offering underground mining as a viable solution to MTR, this film shows us a banner behind musicians at the vigil arguing for alternative energy sources. The film also ends with its beginning Biblical message: “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” a vision that points to the power of a rhetoric of hope, this time based in a more powerful argument for sustainable development that maintains its opposition to corporate coalmining and its exploitation of the natural world.

Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) and Alternative Solutions to Mountaintop Removal Mining

After watching Big Stone Gap (2014),  a less than memorable romantic comedy about a pharmacy owner who falls in love with a Virginia coal miner in Appalachia, I yearned for more authentic representations of my mountain home.  B.J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) offers a glimpse. 

Rise Up! West Virginia presents new, radical arguments against Mountaintop Removal Mining. The film demands alternative energy sources to meet sustainable development goals and effectively maintains its rhetoric against MTR. Even though the film and its subjects strive for and build their arguments on the need for wider distribution of fair use commodities, they also argue against coalmining in general and maintain their position against MTR and corporate coalmining throughout the films. The fact that a large percentage of America’s power is coal generated does not sway them from their demand for new forms of less destructive energy production and consumption.

Rise Up! West Virginia presents George Daughtery, a West Virginia attorney, arguing, “coal mining hasn’t saved the state yet” by effectively juxtaposing images of the pristine mountains that may become a memory with the hell MTR leaves in its wake. Judy Bonds’ narration accompanies pristine images of West Virginia mountains that provide, as Bonds explains, the “sense of place [that] pulls at you” and “makes Appalachians who they are.” With authentic Appalachian music performed by West Virginia musicians, the film highlights this need for a sense of place, even providing a “Bambi shot” of a doe in a hardwood forest. The pure scene is contrasted with shots of mammoth blasting destroying a mountain in Boone County, so, as the film states, the mountain’s “guts are blown out” in a “manmade destruction.” The film also sets up Appalachians as victims like the mountains, both of whom are exploited by corporate mining companies with progressive views of resource exploitation. The film argues that their state has been turned into a Third World colony and will be abandoned after all the coal is brutally extracted.

After this opening that establishes the film’s conflict, a focus on “sustainable energy and jobs” is reinforced with a musical celebration of the land that remains at the Mountain Keepers Music Festival with Larry Gibson, a landowner surrounded by MTR because he refused to sell his land or mineral rights. The festival is meant to provide a voice for the anti-MTR movement and to support alternative and sustainable energy sources that will provide jobs for the region. These anti-MTR protesters align with the pristine nature that could become a memory, like the fish in hollers, thousands of acres of virgin forest, and sandstone rocks now lost because of MTR. 

Although this film documents jobs lost because of the move to MTR, arguments against coalmining chiefly rely on its environmental consequences: timber lost to clear cutting, sludge dams breaking and destroying towns and water sources, valley fills polluting wells and clogging up rivers and streams, blasting not only decapitating mountains but covering whole towns with toxic coal dust, even after covering a processing plant with a dome. 

And the coalmining companies, especially Massey, are established as the culprits for this destruction to the land and people of West Virginia. A child in the film explains, “These coal mines are making us kids sick,” while explaining Massey’s attempts to expand a coal preparation plant near a school. The government, too, is held responsible for ongoing destruction, since they overturn stays on permits and allow MTR and its consequences to continue. 

The film’s ending maintains both the bifurcation between the big guys—corporate miners—and the little guys—citizens of West Virginia. But it also continues its argument for sustainable development. Back at the music festival protestors argue, “Turn off electric gadgets and demand renewable energy.” And they offer suggestions for winning the war against MTR. According to the film, Appalachians should elect responsible people to public office and think of their neighbors. They should make phone calls and write letters. In a nod back toward nostalgia, the film ends with another Bambi shot in a pristine forest and an exclamation: “She’s worth more than all the power in the world,” so “Rise Up! West Virginia,” the film asserts, providing a sense of hope that moves beyond the seemingly hopeless context established in other anti-MTR documentaries. With viable solutions to not only MTR but also coalmining and our reliance on coal for our electricity, hope is preserved.

Reel Images: Gender, Genre and the Movies in English Studies--English Studies Summer Camp for High School Students

Reel Images:  Gender, Genre, and the Movies in English Studies at the English Studies Summer Camp

Eastern Illinois University will host the English Studies Summer Camp July 24-30, 2016. We look forward to welcoming high school students who share our love of reading and writing for years to come. This one-week camp allows students to hone their English skills while providing them with a chance to sample life on a college campus and meet peers with similar interests. Offering courses that reflect students’ interests, our engaged faculty and tranquil setting provide that perfect opportunity for students to have an academically charged summer getaway where they can grow as readers, writers, debaters, and English scholars!

This session will examine gender roles in genre films and highlight ways at least some horror, screwball comedy, and animated movies move beyond gender stereotypes.  Students will learn useful strategies for analyzing film and media portrayals of gender and apply them in a short creative or analytic project in a medium of their choice. 

A Message from Robin Murray, your instructor for “Reel Images: Gender, Genre, and the Movies in English Studies”: Welcome! To prepare for this session, all you need to do is watch your favorite movie (s) and/or television show(s) and think about how you might classify it or them if you were searching for them on Netflix. Do you like animated films or media? Do you like science fiction or fantasy? Do you like dramas? 

Once you have a classification, you’re ready to begin analyzing! Once I have some idea of your favorite films and/or TV shows, we’ll watch clips from them and apply strategies for analyzing them in relation to film and media form, style, and gender representations. 

To get us started, we’ll watch clips from Cabin in the Woods (2012), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Frozen (2014), as well as a variety of Netflix series, including Jessica Jones and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. One of our projects will be to develop a short media project, like a blog, wiki, or podcast, so your film and media knowledge and preferences will come in handy. Please bring them with you!

Program Overview:
 
The EIU English Studies Summer Camp is a unique program that allows students to customize their program of study, selecting two sessions from a range of offerings in creative writing, literature, professional/academic writing, media studies, and more. Students grow academically and socially as they prepare for college and are mentored by expert faculty who share their passion for reading and writing.  Students receive individual attention through small class sizes and gain skills in analyzing and crafting texts and expressing their ideas both verbally and through writing.
The camp offers two levels of discounted tuition:

• a residency rate which includes tuition, housing, recreation, and three meals per day, and
• a commuter rate which includes tuition, some recreational activities, and daily lunches.

Scholarships for full or partial funding are available.